Bogged Down
We are well into Spring. Everything is in bloom, including the salmonberries. And the blackberries and springing back to life. Recently, I decided to take out some blackberries along with retrieving some abandoned items that have been giving me the slightest bit of grief everytime I saw them.
We live on a hill. Most of our property consists of trees going up the hill. Through our property runs a little stream, year ’round. We have a long driveway that goes up and up to the house and to our separated poll barn. Typically, while taking a rest outside of poll barn, I’d look down the hill coming off our road and into the stream and see long abandoned balls from the previous family: basketballs, volleyballs, and soccer balls. All resting down near the stream.
And I’d make a mental note: “I need to climb down there one day and pick all those balls up.” And I’d wonder why they’d leave such expensive items – perfectly good I’m sure at the time of their loss – discarded down by the stream.
Last Sunday was the day. Armed with my short machete, I cut through blackberry (avoiding salmonberry as much as I could) to get to the abandoned balls. And I made a ecological discovery.
I was walking on the land between the stream and the steep hill that runs along the road. Ends up this soil is a bit lower than the stream and wet. Soggy. Boggy. The soil is saturated and there are pools of standing water. And as I made it to the abandoned balls, my right foot went so deep that it was stuck. Then my left foot was stuck. At this point I dropped the machete, wavered back and forth, put my hands on my hips and gazed across the stream, contemplating the blooming skunk cabbage and thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
With one big yank my left foot was free. And I landed on my butt. The Beaker in my mind suddenly started running around with thoughts like, “Ah! What if your big butt starts sinking!” I wasn’t at a good yanking angle but I pulled on my right foot again. Nothing.
“Ah!”
I positioned my left foot and both hands on the most stable dirt I could find and gave one big huge yank.
Ploopf! Freedom! I scurried backwards up the hill, cursing the muscle-cramp I now had in my right calf due to the extraction. I then carefully ambled over to the abandoned balls, flinging them to an open area I could easily collect them from later. Every step back desperately sought reasonably solid ground (I could stand to sink an inch or two but three inches set me on edge).
I think I understand now why the balls were abandoned. I have more abandoned items to retrieve (strangely, some dog toys across the stream — do coyotes steal dog toys to play with?).
I think I’ll wait for things to dry out a bit.
Seattle Magazine's Best of the Food Blogs
Just a listing of Seattle Magazine’s “Best of the Food Blogs” for the Seattle area:
- Cornichon.org — Blog Feed.
- Gluten-Free Girl — Blog Feed.
- Orangette — Blog Feed.
- Seattle Bon Vivant — Blog Feed (ick, partial feed).
- tastingmenu — Blog Feed (ick, partial feed, too; what’s up with that, Hillel?).
- Accidental Hedonist — Blog Feed.
- Cook & Eat — Blog Feed (partial).
- Talk of Tomatoes — Blog Feed.
- Roots and Grubs — Blog Feed.
Oh, the last one, Roots and Grubs, has a post today that says the Good Dog, Bad Dog sausage restaurant in downtown Portland has closed. I only went there a couple of times and now I regret everytime I walked by and didn’t stop. It was one of those whimsical store-fronts that always made me smile. Molly has a shot of the sign in her Portland Typography post.
A New Job at Microsoft for Eric!
It’s been a couple of weeks since I made a big shift at Microsoft: I moved out of Office and into a completely different group at Microsoft. I’m very excited about the new group, what it is currently working on to ship, and the future features that the team is going to deliver.
I’ll certainly miss being in the Office group. I’ve really been with the same group since starting at Microsoft back in 1997, just sort of surfing along through the various re-orgs. But when the job req for the position I ended up moving to was posted to an internal list, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I even sat down and drew out ideas for growth and connections for the group through-out Microsoft properties.
If you can find a job that gets you constantly thinking in a positive and expansive way, well, go for it! So I did. It took me sometime to work though the internal job change process but now I’m in Building 119 and have hit the ground running.
It’s a great group. This is shown by the fact that I’ve at least felt both productive and part of the team already over the past couple of weeks.
I look forward to shipping so that I can start saying more about the team and its mission.
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass semi-Preview
Wow, it’s taken a bit of digging to try to find any sort of preview for The Golden Compass, coming out in December of this year: His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass at WorstPreviews .
Ends up it’s mostly a technical preview because it’s half pre-special effects from the movie, half-behind the scenes. I’m really looking forward to the movie because I was really enchanted with the book series, which led in a direction that I never expected (saying goodbye to the concept of a Kingdom in Heaven and rather fighting for the Republic of Heaven).
Official movie site: The Golden Compass.
From the "I'm not making this stuff up" Department…
Today’s Saturday Seattle P-I has the following front page story about an incident at a Bainbridge Island elementary school:
The victim? An unsuspecting sixth-grade teacher. The weapon? Strawberry lip gloss.
In a caper worthy of Wile E. Coyote’s finest failures, two 12-year-old girls from Bainbridge Island are accused of attempting to elude punishment for a tardy assignment Thursday by poisoning their teacher, Kasey Jeffers, with a flavored lip balm they knew would make her ill.
Read more: Girls, 12, allegedly poison teacher at school (and I love the Wile E. Coyote reference).
Truly, you’d want to set an appointment reminder for about fifteen to twenty years into the future to check-in on these two young ladies and find out how their path in life has turned out.
For a Stephen King novel, this incident would be an important bit of backstory…
That Time of Year – Twenty-Five for $25
It’s time for the spring Seattle-area Twenty-Five restaurants with $25 prix fixe dinners: Twenty-Five for $25 Dine Around Seattle March 1-29. Some of the restaurants are also featuring a $15 lunch.
My Sweetie and I dove into the first 25 for 25 that happened after we moved to Redmond. It is a great way to get to know the area restaurants without draining your budget… given that you can resist cocktails and wine and such with your meal.
The Eastside restaurants on the list include:
- Barking Frog right near Willows Lodge. If you like Redhook beer, you can easily walk over to the Redhook pub and have a delicious pint before and/or after.
- Third Floor Fish Cafe in downtown Kirkland (on the water – try to go for the sunset!). Nice place just for happy hour appetizers, too.
- Yarrow Bay Grill & Beach Cafe (on the water, too – ditto on the sunset!)
Make your reservations soon according to the restrictions of when they are serving their prix fixe menu (Sundays through Thursdays). I remember the Barking Frog filling up quickly. When you go, after you’re seated they hand you both the regular menu and the prix fixe menu.
The meals typically are a tad bit smaller than the regular menu dinners, but you know, in this day of wild excess, I feel that the meals are actually the right size of what we should be eating. And tend to taste wonderful!
Sneaky, Sneaky Snow
So, Puget Sound residents, how much surprise snow did you get? A bit from the Seattle-PI:
The Weather Service, he said, has received reports of nearly a foot of snow in parts of Bothell and Monroe. Near Shoreline and up to Lake Forest Park, about two inches of snow fell, he added.
The area around South Everett received eight inches of snow and Mill Creek had over 10 inches of the white stuff.
(From: Weather to clear by Thursday afternoon )
My sweetie and I got home last night and noticed patches of snow already on the edges of the drive. Then as we wrapped up dinner an icy mix came down, followed by very determined snow. I sat by the fireplace in my reading chair keeping an eye out through the window on the snowy handrails leading down our front walk’s stairs. It didn’t look like anything to worry about. Maybe a quarter of an inch of snow on the handrails.
Less than an inch? Pish-posh.
Ends up that handrail accumulation is not a good metric to use in the future. The handrail is sheltered by a Douglas Fir and a Red Western Cedar. When I went out with Bella for a walk before bed I was impressed that we were nearly four inches of snow already and it was still coming down.
We’re well over five inches and seem to be damage free, though Bella and I found a large cedar bough on the ground down by the front-edge of our property that had snapped off due to snow load.
Quick Hike at Cougar Mountain
Elisa and I did a quick Saturday hike in the sunshine in the Cougar Mountain wildlife area: King County Virtual Map Counter: Cougar Mountain.
We started at the Red Town trailhead and got onto the Cave Hole Trail, to the By Pass to Fred’s Railroad Trail and then back on Quarry to Red Town.
In addition to lots of cave holes (the trail is well named) we saw lots of trees snapped and down from the 2006 windstorm. The caves are considered dangerous due to cave-in and poisonous gasses (methane, I believe). Along the way, we’d see remains of abandoned structures. I have no idea what they were and they linger there in anonymity.
Red Town is one of those settlements that no longer exist. Newcastle / Coal Creek was quite the coal mining area. I flipped through one of our history books, A Hidden Past: An Exploration of Eastside History, and discovered that 10 million tons of coal was harvested from the Newcastle fields (the last company closed up in 1963).
Wow.
Eric's Favorite Quotes, VI.
(Okay, this is the last bunch of quotes I typed up from the various snippets of quotes I have been collecting over the past few years.)
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
– William Shakespeare
To the right, books; to the left, a tea-cup. In front of me, the fireplace; behind me, the post. There is no greater happiness than this.
– Teiga
What’s here right now? Delusion is yesterday’s dream – enlightenment, tomorrow’s delusion.
– Taizan Maezumi
Work is much more fun than fun.
– Noel Coward
One day at the monastery of Master Fugai Ekun, ceremonies delayed preparation of the noon meal, which forced the cook to hurry. He took up his sickle and quickly gathered vegetables from the garden, then threw it all into a soup pot – unaware that in his haste he had cut off the head of a snake.
At the meal, the monks where highly complementary of the delicious soup, but the Roshi himself found something odd in his bowl. He summoned the cook and held up the snake head. “What is this?!?”
“Oh, thank you, Roshi!” the cook said, and immediately ate it.
– “Eating the Blame” Zen Story
No man is born wise.
– Don Quixote
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
– Antonio Porchia
Technorati tags: Eric Richards, Quotes, Quotations
Ayn Rand and Epictetus
I had a nice lunch-time meet-up last week. Topic for consideration: what story or tale affected your life… and how?
At first I thought: ooo, I don’t have any idea on this one. I’ve read quite a few stories, mostly junk science-fiction and fantasy when I lived in Maryland, I can’t think of any -
Oh. Two popped into mind.
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
- A Man in Full by Tom Wolf.
Like many teenagers, Atlas Shrugged really screwed me up.
Before my senior year in high school, I was fortunate to go on a three-week Europe trip… high-school students from three different locations in the US (Texas, California, and North Carolina) with teacher and community escorts (what where they thinking? “Oh, this will be fun!” Sheesh.).
Anyway, one of the darkly sad poetic girls on the trip talked with me in a shaded patio in Lucerne one day, and at the end wrote something on a piece of paper. Amidst the shade and sunlight, she gave me the paper, and said, “You need to read this book.”
“Atlas Shrugged.”
So I did.
That led to a self-centered ego-trip and me-centric philosophy that spanned well into my college years. Ayn Rand led to more Ayn Rand and then later to Nietzsche.
What’s interesting in retrospect is that recently I took a course where we were introduced to Robert Kegan’s levels of self. A teenager is pretty much focused on getting what they want, and any means to do that are acceptable. It’s an amoral view of the world based on desire. That jives pretty well with Ayn Rand’s point of view. The next level of self is achieved as some level of empathy develops in a person.
Many years, and many philosophical crises later, I picked up the book-on-tape set of Tom Wolf’s “A Man in Full” at Half-Price Books, read by David Ogden Stiers. I had read reasonable reviews of the story and my drive from Graham to Redmond was long. I had time to listen to a good book.
A turning point for two of the characters in the book is their discovery of the stoic philosopher Epictetus. The story has the two men deal with the crisis in their lives by integrating the stoic philosophy into their world view and use it to survive the crushing blows fate deals them.
The teachings of Epictetus resonated strongly with me.
I had been reading Zen teachings for quite some time (it was my next level as I grew out of my dark Ayn Rand / Nietzsche years). I wasn’t so much into the spiritual aspects of Zen / Buddhism as I was in the point of view and the awareness of the now. It was also a pretty inclusive point of view, respecting all enlightened souls.
Epictetus? Some say that the Serenity Prayer, while not by Epictetus, summarizes his core stoic point of view:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
The most important point being realizing what you have an effect over and then realizing what you do not. Do not let those events or those people who you cannot and do not control bother you. Furthermore, it’s developing an awareness of how you react to the events and situations and people around you and being aware that you control your own reactions.
Which brings us back to Kegan. As part of elevating yourself through the levels of “self,” you become aware of an aspect you hadn’t noticed before and turn this from the subjective to the objective. The subject to the scrutinized object. In class, they said this is like realizing you’ve been looking through a lens and being unaware that there was a lens. Now you’re aware that there is a lens and how it has been distorting your view.
Once you’re aware of it, you become aware of how you have allowed this subjective thing to influence you. By becoming aware of the influence, you can change and grow.
A lot of philosophies come back to awareness of self and the unseen influences of who you are that are guiding you. Perhaps in an unhappy direction.
I picked up Sharon Lebell’s book “The Art of Living” which is her version of Epictetus’ teachings, modernized and made shiny. It’s very nice for a quick read. Highly recommended for anyone to have to flip through on occasion and reflect upon. As I hit my personal hardships, I meditated on the teachings quite often and found it very comforting. It helped me a great deal, and I’ve valued the teachings.
Anyway. Two stories that affected my life. It will be interesting to see what the third might end up being.